Sunday Round-up

My round-up of news, events and stuff and nonsense from the last seven days.
If it’s news to me, it must be news to you!

Karma: An early example of the Indian snakes and ladders game from 1800 from The Royal Asiatic Society can now be found online. The game was originally a moral journey to achieve the supreme Brahman status of pure being.

Funereal fun: One of the strangest traditions in rural China is to employ strippers to perform a burlesque in order to attract more mourners to attend at funerals, but now the authorities have launched a crackdown on such ‘funeral misdeeds’.

Headache:Graham’s Number is simply so big that trying to memorise it would cause a black hole to appear in your brain, as the video on the right explains.

Can you believe it: Eight and nine-year-olds in Missouri are going ahead with their raffle to win an AR-15 automatic rifle, the same weapon used in the Florida school massacre. But then what can you expect if they have a president who thinks the answer is to arm teachers and needs a cue card to remind him to fake empathy.

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My daughter’s 8th-grade class will be having a debate on the issue of guns and the (to my mind, stupid) idea to arm teachers. There was a piece on CB News about how the Israelis control school perimeters, how no one outside the army has a gun before age 27 and that they’re tested psychologically and in terms of gun proficiency before getting a license.